The Rest of Us: A Novel (37 page)

His Berkeley-schooled acupuncturist gave him a list of herbs to buy, specific for liver cancer, including various mushroom extracts and milk thistle. On Grand Street, where they sold turtles, and fish crammed into tanks so they could barely wiggle to stay afloat, and other forms of cruelty, we went on a crappy morning to find these herbs that would supposedly help him. Here, where no one seemed to be living a high-quality life. If these potions did what they promised, wouldn’t these people have made a bunch of money and moved away to a decent house, a more tranquil environment?

The sky was spitting rain, spreading dark, infectious puddles on the street corners. Under the sooty clouds and weak sun, I walked, angry, so angry. I was going on weeks of barely contained rage. A burning tower of anger split up through my soul, but I spoke to Rhinehart sweetly, and squeezed his hand, and he told me to deal with it however I was going to, my emotions wouldn’t stay consistent anyway. The man, a Korean man, went into the back, while we waited out by a cheap plywood desk tacked up with posters showing the different reflexology zones of the foot. The place had the confusing smells of chamomile and dust, dried things, of the period after decay, when things turn brittle and disintegrate in the hand. We left, a hundred dollars later, Rhinehart clutching a plastic sack of dried plants with reputed medicinal properties.

I had little hope in that or in anything. During the day I was exhausted, wet manacles of sadness dragging me down. At night I was poisoned with insomnia. Around 2 a.m., I’d leave Rhinehart asleep in the bed, like a soul up and departing a body. I was going to watch television.
Every night between two and five, I sat glued to the sickly glow of the screen and felt the toxic panic working its way through my blood. I thought about Rhinehart dying. I thought about him writhing in pain. Next month? Next week? I thought about the baby trapped inside my body, and how I no longer had a choice not to have it. I was trapped, too. The baby would have to come out. And then what? Would Rhinehart be dead by then? I was chained to these thoughts, sometimes gasping, unable to disconnect my line of vision from the screen. I no longer talked to God, who hadn’t listened to me the one time it had really counted. Instead, I talked to myself. I said awful, ugly things.

•  •  •

“Nothing’s been decided yet,” Hallie said. She meant “he isn’t dead yet.” “Now is the time to call on your spirituality.” A familiar refrain. She wanted me to come to her Buddhist center with her. She said she was chanting for us to get through this. She told me I was depressed.

“The only man I’ve ever loved is dying before my eyes. Just when we’re going to have a baby. So, you’re right! I’m depressed! Thank you for your wisdom. Would you like to tell me why this is happening? What the spiritual significance is?”

Her eyes were red. “I don’t know. I don’t know why.”

“Then just shut up about it. I don’t want to hear your Buddhist talk right now. It’s hard enough even waking up in the morning. I just have to put my head down and get through it.”

Once I said this, I thought, And then what? What was the end result here? Get through to the time when he dies and then get over that? Things would never get better. Rhinehart was dying. And I was unable to do anything about it. I had never felt so useless in my entire life.

•  •  •

But it was a quiet kind of dying, of the type that lulls you with its normalcy. Rhinehart took me to the obstetrician, to the movies, to hear Umberto Eco speak at the New School. He’d been losing weight,
but he was also so upbeat and genuinely interested in the world that some days I almost managed to forget the disease gathering in his body. I was desperate to play along. For the act to be the truth.

We took a walk through Central Park. Fall would be unimpressive this year. We hadn’t had enough rain, and some of the leaves had turned brown prematurely. The light struck a blighted tree near the pond, sharpening it, so that it didn’t even seem like a tree, but a dead stick someone had shoved into the ground. I thought about how in moments of fear everything was intensified. The street lamps down by the Columbus Circle station were glittering spots, carved out in the sky. I looked around blankly. I wasn’t fully here. I wasn’t fully anywhere.

“So gorgeous,” Rhinehart said, patting the gnarled trunk of an oak. “The best thing about nature is that she reminds you you’re part of a cycle, yours and hers. I can remember my own tangled thoughts walking this path at another time. And yet how silly they seem.”

I nodded, but I was thinking about whether I would ever be able to come back here after this day. Even enter the park. He smiled broadly at me, like a child would. He grasped my hand in his, and slightly swinging it, walked up the path. He said, “You’re not handling this so well.”

I was indignant. How
dare
you, I thought, which I translated to, “How should I be handling it?”

I could sense him trying to be delicate. “Tatie, this is awful, terrible, shocking news. The only thing worse would be if our situations were reversed. But this is part of life. On some level we have to accept it, and once we do, we can appreciate the time we have together. I want to do that.”

I halted on the path, so he had to stop and backtrack. “I can’t accept it. I’m unable to.”

“My sweet, sweet baby. There’s life for you still. There’s life for me.”

“How can you be so calm?” I pictured him in that lousy hotel room where he’d holed up after receiving his mother’s letters. His hair sticking up.

He stared at me, his eyes tearing. “I’m not. I’m terrified and I’m angry and more than anything I feel guilty. I wake up at night paralyzed with it. I’m abandoning my own child. I know what that’s like! I know the empty place it creates in a child’s life. I swore I’d never do it, and I’m about to.”

“But it’s not your fault,” I said.

“We don’t need something to be our fault to feel shame about it.” He put his arms around me, talking into my hair. “This is the cruelest thing I’ve ever done to you, both of you, and I’m so sorry for it. I’m so sorry I got sick.”

I had started crying, and it felt like everything was coming up and out of my burning throat.

He said, “But this isn’t anybody’s fault. It isn’t God’s. So instead of acting as if we’re in an emotional war, how about we try and see it differently. Because I am a very blessed man. I’ve led, and I’m continuing to lead, a very blessed life. I’ll never want to consciously give it up, but this looks to be the way things are going, and we can’t spend months angry. I don’t want to. I want to love you. Even better than I have before. It’s most important that I get it right now.”

He asked me if I was praying, and I felt ashamed saying no, as if I wasn’t availing myself of every possible means of helping him.

“You should try meditating with Hallie. You’re going to need something. The road ahead is too treacherous to go alone.” We were going to have to push into places we never imagined we’d be, he said, and it was best that we tried to go there together, instead of separately. I agreed because I loved him, and I wanted to please him, and because I didn’t know what else to do. There was something glimmering in his words that if I could grasp it, would keep me from being swallowed alive. “We need to understand that there is a plan at work here—even if we can’t see it, we trust it.”

“How am I going to live without you?” I said.

“I don’t have to be here to be close.”

•  •  •

Hallie was thrilled I was finally coming to the center with her, convinced my salvation was bound up in it. Maybe I did feel calmer, more inclined to think of things I was grateful for. Maybe I had just begun the slow process of acceptance, although I struggled, the ship had begun to move. I needed it, because soon after Rhinehart was to get much more ill, and when he did, it happened quicker than I ever would have thought possible, than anyone had predicted. I didn’t realize how much of his illness I’d been dealing with on a theoretical level and how little all that thinking had done to prepare me for anything.

•  •  •

I woke up one morning, complaining about how the baby seemed to have jammed its feet in between my ribs, when I turned over and saw Rhinehart. He stared at me with hot hollow pits of eyes.

“I don’t feel so well,” he said.

“I’m going to call the doctor.”

“No, no. Just lie here with me.” His head shook. He was shivering, even though the room was overheated, and the quilt pulled up to his chin. His face, even the whites of his eyes had a yellowish cast.

I called the hospital. They wanted me to bring him in. I went back into the room, where Rhinehart was staring out the window at nothing.

While he dressed I watched him, the hairless skin on his buttocks and the backs of his knees made me turn away. The khaki pants he preferred were almost too loose to wear, and I suddenly remembered him at Chechna’s, months and months ago, and how when he leaned over in his chair, the fabric stretched tight across his thighs. I helped him with his shirt, and he stood patiently, like a child, too weak to protest.

We waited and waited. More forms. Tests. His platelet count was low, but there was little that could be done about that. The jaundice wasn’t being caused by a block in the bile duct, which would have required a risky procedure to put in a stent. By itself, jaundice wasn’t
harmful, but it was a sign that his liver was beginning to fail. To see Rhinehart so complacent, so quiet and obedient, waiting for the doctor to write out a prescription for Benadryl in case he started to itch, broke me, and I started sobbing. Rhinehart had revived and was more spirited. He was patting my back, which was making me cry harder. I excused myself to go to the lavatory. “She’s a very strong woman,” I heard him tell the nurse as I left.

•  •  •

In the car ride home, he said, “It’s strange to be out in the world,” and I saw how without realizing it we’d adjusted to spending most of our time indoors.

We came back to a quiet apartment at midday. He was exhausted from the trip. His eyes kept unfocusing, and so I let him sleep for a few hours.

In the early evening I went into the darkened room to get a sweater, and saw that his eyes were open. He smiled, slowly, as if even moving his facial muscles was an effort. “How are you feeling, Tatie?”

“Fine,” I said.

“How is your back? Is it bothering you?”

I shook my head silently. I leaned into the window, my forehead against the pane. A cool, wet night was pushing against the glass. The veggie burger I’d had for dinner sat heavy in my stomach. Rhinehart reached for me and fell short. He stroked the covers instead, and I climbed into the bed and curled up, my body feeling enormous next to his. I lifted his hand and put it on my ass. He squeezed it.

“My obstetrician gave me the name of a woman who can come and stay with me after the baby is born. To help. She’s a retired nurse. She called while you were sleeping. I’m going to meet with her tomorrow.” I now hired people for everything. A man had come in and assembled the crib. Groceries were delivered from the supermarket. I was highly organized and spent the day making lists, phone numbers, times when Rhinehart’s friends were stopping by to see him, supplies
I still needed for the baby, including a sterilizer for the bottles. I had preregistered with the hospital and had already packed my bag even though my delivery date was more than a month away. I had arranged for a driver to be on call. “Do a dry run of the route to the hospital together,” Rhinehart had advised me. We did. It took seven minutes.

“I think we should find out the baby’s sex and not wait,” I said.

“I can tell you, it’s going to be a girl. I hope she has your eyes. You have beautiful eyes. They’re so big and deep and loving. You know the pagans believed that love dwelled in the beams of the eyes. That you could shoot a man through with just a look.”

I smiled. “Is that what happened to you?”

“Yes, and I began to keen. I had fallen in love.” He stroked my hair. “I remember missing you so much when I was in Ukraine. I used to lie on that mattress, it felt like it was filled with straw, and try and conjure you up. Your smell. The feel of your plump little lips. Those hairpins you drop all over the house.”

“I don’t wear those hairpins anymore. I stopped in college.”

“To me, you’ll always wear them. I’d think about the little sighing you used to make in your sleep.” He smiled to himself. “Had I known how wonderful it was going to be falling in love with you again, I would have tried to make it happen sooner.”

Rhinehart didn’t give any specifics about the type of burial he wanted, and I hated to bring it up. Before he got sick, he’d talked about how interesting mausoleums were—a small, heavy-hewed stone house, where your box of bones was carefully and tidily stowed in a little niche in the wall. I took this as a fleeting fascination and not a directive.

In his will, I was the sole beneficiary. He brought in his financial advisor to go over all the investments, which he had regulated so that the baby and I would have enough to live on.

“Once your photography begins to take off, you may not even need this money, but best to be safe.”

The gallery show. I’d forgotten about it. It seemed to have happened years ago. The majority of my pieces had sold.

•  •  •

He was taken over by a new project—a scrapbook of his life. “I don’t ever want my child to have to agonize over who daddy was,” he said. “Here I get to document my past and also describe myself.”

“Is this going to be a heroic account?”

“Perhaps. You can have your say, too, and feel free to be honest. There will be sections for our relationship as well. Parts 1 and 2. I come off better in Part 2.” I brought boxes of his mementos into the bedroom. He had saved things I didn’t think he would have, such as faded
New York Times
reviews of his books, both good and bad, copies of his magazine articles, and notes I had written him when I was in college. Everything in lowercase. The appropriation of his terms of endearment for me.

I’ve gone to class, my love. Will be back at 4. Let’s go get a drink at the Briar. Will you come with me? Toby’s band is playing. I want to catch the first set.